I’m in love with the iPad. It rather neatly resolves the dillema I’ve documented in the past regarding my computing needs. I have always disliked the idea having more than one computer. I like elegant gadget solutions as I can’t afford to buy different devices frequently and I’m amazingly OCD so I don’t like overcomplicating things. I’ll be saving a huge amount of money getting an iMac and iPad instead of an iMac and MacBook Pro.

The vitriol about what the iPad isn’t has been unending and I think the haters are all just missing the bigger picture. iPad is great, people who don’t like it aren’t required to like it. The people who weren’t planning on buying one anyway need to shut the hell up already, obviously it wasn’t made for them. I had a huge post coming together about this and even I began to get bored with it so I will let far more eloquent and geeky people say it all for me.

TUAW’s amazing Erica Sadun, writer/developer/geek extrordinaire, wrote In praise of the iPad: A contrarian view. Jon Armstrong over at Blurbomat.com made an excellent case for Casual Computing and very clearly explains Who’s Gonna Buy That?

We are not apologists. (I’ve been clear in criticizing Apple in the past and just recently discontinued my subscription to MobileMe.) We are lovers of technology, geeks, who can see a device for what it is and it’s amazing potential as it has been realized.

P.S. Flash is the devil, HTML5 will save us from Adobe’s ever-bloating evil. I’m willing to wait for more widespread adoption.

P.P.S. The Hulett Plumbing Disaster Part II coming tomorrow!!!

The stats for this new iPod were staggering. It had a four gigabyte hard drive, could run for hours between charges, charged and synced data with one simple FireWire cable, and most amazingly you could transfer an entire album to it in 30 seconds. 30 SECONDS!!! Surely this was evidence that we were living in the future. I couldn’t believe what I was reading because it was just all too amazing.

I also remember feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness. It’s original price point of $399 seemed to be far to high for mass adoption rates. It only would work with Macs which I saw as a major shortcoming, though I was an amazing fanboy even then, as that also would immediately disqualify the vast bulk of consumers. I figured that I was looking at yet another beautiful Apple flop à la Twentieth Anniversary Mac or G4 Cube. I put the newspaper down and resigned myself to the idea that Apple was amazing, but might never have a product that would captivate the world or hold a majority of any market.

Several weeks later I heard of a student at my rural high school not just getting an iPod from his parents, but an iMac in order to use the new device. This would have been quite the revelation for the geeks, but the news had trickled down through the mainstream grapevine. The iPod was causing a stir and soon enough, it hit critical mass. Less than 10 years later, the iPod had become not just any device, but the device responsible for shaping the digital music revolution. It’s companion software iTunes being just as transformative to the process of buying music.

A similar feat, coupled with similar awe and just a hint of skepticism (even from me) was accomplished with the launch of the iPhone and eventually the App Store. Both have done a huge amount to shape how consumers view smartphones, expect to interact with these devices, how we view the Internet from the point of view of mobile, and location based services. The iPhone and App Store have even influenced how the tech industry views the process of development and distribution of software in general as well as how we define the the role and responsibilities (for better or worse) of mobile operating system vendors.

This brings us to where we stand today. On Wednesday Apple are launching a brand new device. What was originally referred to as just a “creation”, which could be interpreted on grand or small scales, was clarified today during Apple’s Q4 2009 earnings call by Steve Jobs himself as “a major new product.” The rumor mill leads us to be looking forward to an iSlate/iPad/iBook relaunch thingamabob.

This new “slate” class form factor, which is to netbook as tablet is to notebook, is hoped to find a solid foothold in the consumer electronics market. Tablet PCs, which were hoped to be a transformative product class, became a mainstream disaster. They managed to find a niche in the medical field and other specialist fields, but really failed to change the world as expected by the likes of Bill Gates.

That accounts for my skepticism which has always been a prerequisite for any awesome and successful Apple product launch, especially one expected to be so novel. The level of potential awesomeness is off the charts for what has been bandied about, but I won’t get into all the details as they are scattered and range so far and wide. I would refer you to my sources for the rumor mongering:

Gizmodo

The Unofficial Apple Weblog

AppleInsider

Mac Rumors

9 to 5 Mac

So here is hoping this new device, whatever it is, manages to be just as amazing, implausible, and ultimately successful as the iPod and iPhone. It’s been too long since I’ve had a new must-have gadget to lust over.

(As a side note, does anyone remember the Nokia N770 “Internet Device”? Not totally the same market, but similar enough to cause me to worry.)

I haven’t posted because I ended up caving in and doing something stupid.  I knew this would happen after being so vocal about my dislike of the iPhone 3GS pricing.  I thought that I could be a good boy and wait for the next revolutionary change in the iPhone product line and pass on this evolutionary offering.  I even thought I might be able to leave the iPhone and to back to my Nokia roots and live happily with a Symbian smartphone…  Then my brother called and asked to buy my iPhone for a really fair price and the whole deal was off.  I went and bought a new iPhone 3GS.  I had convinced myself that I could live without it.

I was without my crackPhone for a week.  A single week.  After just 48 hours the deal was off.  It was like my right arm had been severed just below the shoulder.  I hadn’t realized that my day-to-day information was tied up in the stupid thing and I just couldn’t jump ship.  Apple’s advertising push of “there’s an app for that” really defines the struggle I had to a T.  The primary application which really brought the situation to light is an elegantly simple and free application called Balance which I use to keep track of my “fun money” checking account apart from my bill pay and savings accounts.  I love this application to little bits and pieces all over and I really couldn’t find anything on the two competing platforms (S60 Symbian on Nokia and Android from Google) which I liked.

I also enjoy the fact that my credit union partners with the vendor who powers the Mobile Banking application which I use to pay bills with a very simple, sleek interface.  In fact I have come to depend on the simple and sleek interfaces for most of my daily computing and communication functions including GPS, SMS, mail, scheduling, contact management, weather, social networking, news, reference, blogging (!!!), and last but not least (considering its an iDevice) media sharing and consumption.  I know that most of these functions are available on every other smartphone on the market, but the unified design aesthetic which has emerged among the applications, cultivated and encouraged by Apple, is a key selling point for me.

This just shows how Apple has, yet again, figured out a way and developed it carefully, to keep people hooked.  Unlike the original closed sandbox created with the iTunes Music Store  and DRM (which was forced upon them by the music labels to an extent) which fenced you within the iPod ecosystem, Apple benefits from the very nature of software development being so involved with a single platform.  They have provided a very powerful set of tools to lure developers, both brand spanking new and veteran developers, to develop some amazing (and some not so amazing) applications which now number in the tens of thousands.  This abundance drives competition and provides numerous choices which serve almost every need imaginable.

Apple originally stated that dynamic web applications and Web 2.0 would be enough to drive independent innovation through the browser and no one would need to develop applications to run on the iPhone operating system.  The sandbox was closed with a big sign nailed to the tree next to it saying, “No Independent Development Allowed!”  Two things changed this.  The first being the jailbreak community which started to grow, cultivating a market for unauthorized 3rd-party apps.  People were able to see just how much was possible with the iPhone and demanded open development.  The second issue being the new influx of smart devices which use the WebKit browser which powers Safari on the iPhone.  Suddenly all these dynamic web applications benefit every platform, some of which had faster radios and chipsets, outpacing the performance the first and second generation iPhones.

Now I have to say that I firmly believe Apple did intend to open the platform to 3rd-party development from the beginning.  I could spin numerous reasons and ideas as to why this wasn’t offered at the get-go, but I do believe that the situation evolved much more quickly and in more directions than Apple anticipated.  Their hand was forced to a great extent and but they didn’t just roll over. They pulled something very clever out of their hat in traditional Apple style.  They created the iPhone SDK and a simple, effective distribution model through the iTunes app store which took a lot of hassle out of the development, debugging, marketing, distribution and sales processes.  Regular developers with ideas for applications could publish them straight to the market and not have to worry about the business end of things.  There were still strings attached with limitations to the APIs available to developers and the sometimes cumbersome app approval process but it paved the way for hundreds and then thousands of developers to get busy.

Just one year later, with a store now packed full of tens of thousands of applications, Apple now has an effortless way of keeping people loyal while driving new adoption: a diverse and robust set of applications with compelling features and an easy way to keep consuming more.  With an average of 20 apps downloaded per iPhone, people build up a personal portfolio of sorts made up of their “OMG-I-can’t-live-without-this” applications.  The device becomes “sticky” or embedded into the daily functions of a person’s life.  It enables certain convenient behaviors and habits and is in every meaning of the word, an addiction.  Sure I could have lived without my iPhone, just like any one could technically function without internet access or a telephone.  But would I want to?  Absolutely not.